Haunted Trauma Narratives of Inclusion, Race, and Disability in a School Community

Abstract

By typical definitions in the special education world, inclusion would not be recognizable as it exists at Memorial Elementary. Memorial is responding to a widely documented trend in public schools: over-representation of students of color, particularly Black and Brown students, in high-incidence special education categories, including emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). I conceptualize EBD as unacknowledged suppression of hauntings from transgenerational trauma—legacies of institutional racism, poverty, and attempts at dehumanization. My primary hypothesis is that Memorial’s practice and ethic of unconditional belonging has been a transformation afforded by being haunted. I argue that haunted trauma narratives affirm and reconstruct the personhood of students of color with ghosts of trauma. Through narrativizing, students of color and educators rebuild inclusion from difference-as-allowed toward Martin Luther King Jr.’s (2001) “beloved community” (p. 458). That is, Memorial has redesigned school structures, educators’ beliefs and practices, interactions with children and their families, and other aspects of everyday systems to be organized around the intersections of race, trauma, identity, and community. Though dreaming is undeniably difficult, Memorial also illustrates the transformative power of affective forces from ghosts that demand hope, justice, and healing.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I use various terms to refer to students who are at the center of this project. Depending on the context, I refer to students of color with EBD to name where students have been positioned in the institutional system of special education; students of color who have been labeled with EBD to point out the artificial construction of EBD in the United States; and disabled students of color to suggest that students have been disabled by social institutions, including schools.

2 The narrative vignettes are drawn from an ethnography I conducted during one school year at Memorial Elementary. Memorial was a traditional public school in a large city school district on the East Coast of the United States Like many city districts, the school district had a fraught history with racial segregation. And, like most school districts in the United States, there were and continue to be substantially separate classrooms and schools for students with EBD labels. Memorial had housed two largely independent strands—general education (upstairs) and behavior units (downstairs)—in the same building.

I spent 35 school days at Memorial, approximately 1 week per month. For each week of data collection, I shadowed and/or interviewed school leaders. I also observed in classrooms, spending more time in classrooms where teachers also participated in video recorded lessons. I interviewed almost all teachers and one paraprofessional, the special education administrator and coordinator, school counselor, school librarian, and 13 parents, and held focus groups with each grade level of students (from pre-K to fifth grade). I also shadowed several students (with and without EBD labels) in each grade level. Given this spread of data, I was able to experience the physical, intellectual, and emotional ups and downs of daily life at Memorial.

I kept detailed observation logs and notes. At the end of each day, I wrote reflection notes and at the end of each data collection visit I wrote up vignettes of particularly rich moments that seemed to illustrate something about inclusion. I had transcriptions of all interviews, focus groups, and videos of classroom instruction and schoolwide events. As I read my data, I recognized the principal’s focus on stories and the school’s why statement to articulate counternarratives. I honed in on rereading data that illustrated how inclusion and EBD at Memorial interacted with haunting and trauma narratives. For this article, I selected vignettes to represent different perspectives—student, leader, and teacher.